Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by huggyface | Hacker News Reader

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Which subreddits do you subscribe to where you see that unwanted content?

It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?)

That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in.

Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre.

Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.

If you think that subreddits don't matter, then you are clearly expecting from Reddit something that it was not designed to have. The most popular subreddits are swarmed with teenagers and the quality has gone downhill, that's true. But the value of Reddit is in its (less popular) subreddits.

huggyface's point is that Reddit should hide uninteresting-for-me material and surface interesting-for-me material automatically. Subscribing to subreddits is a manual process that shouldn't be necessary.

How is subscribing to a subreddit fundamentally different from upvoting? To get recommendations, you need to somehow feed the recommendation engine with your interests.

Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."

So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.

you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."

With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".

Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?

It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...

the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance.

So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.

While I'm being extreme, in practical application it would be a simple reduced weighting of negative correlation users. e.g. if five people I correlate heavily with liked a /r/programming entry, that will rise above a post liked by one hundred people I have a poor correlation with. Rinse/repeat.

Heavy math/statistical analysis that can be tuned to create a productive enjoyable experience, with the side benefit that it reduces gaming and exploitation.

With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".

No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.

Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.

And I think most users of reddit would disagree. Sometimes I visit /r/gaming or even gasp /r/all knowing what I'm going to get. Likewise, I visit /r/games knowing I'm not going to get the same content as /r/gaming.

Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.

Like maybe a new Digg? :)

If you think that subreddits don't matter

Categorization does still matter (in the Netflix example they can competently recommend and rank for me, but they still allow me to filter into specific categories). Subreddits are useful.

However subreddits are a very coarse, manual solution to what I described.

To the comment about what reddit is designed for, it started sans subreddits. Indeed, an original focus was recommendations, but either the algorithms or the hardware wasn't there to support it, the result being a bit of a disaster. So they went down the manual binning approach.

Manual binning is more than the "hack", it's the reason Reddit is successful and the reason why Digg will not be (unless they emulate).

Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion.

If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.

You cannot get your users to respect the difference between communities if you are unwilling to show them that each community is different, and deserves individual attention.

Sure, find a better algorithm for the front page and logged out users.

But to destroy the autonomy of the subreddit would be to destroy the very thing that makes reddit successful.

Why do you think they can't coexist? In fact my actual suggestion is that they should coexist. But the "just subscribe appropriately" response is fundamentally broken, and only provides a partial solution. This approach absolutely benefits any subreddit as well.

What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits? If you are interested in fitness, you subscribe to /r/fitness. Fitness materials won't all of a sudden be posted to /r/gaming where you (if you are not subscribed) will miss them.

So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.

Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?

This was already answered in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323033

What exactly is fundamentally broken in subscribing to subreddits?

"I like action movies" "Here's Megashark vs 747. You like action movies, so you like this"

How is any given subreddit any different? Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness. Further social news sites are subject to the tyranny of the minority -- aka the lowest common denominator. When people are more likely to express approval than disapproval, a small percentage of users with a common interest will tend to dominate.

Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness.

I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.

If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.

That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.

I'm not missing the point of subreddits at all, and I would suggest that you are so far down the rabbit hole of the cure all subreddit that you refuse to acknowledge the point.

I have never said that subreddits should go away. Ever. Each post that again argues one versus the other is tossing up a distraction.

They are not for finding people that agree with you

Correlation isn't about agreement: An upvote does not mean "I agree with this". It means "I found this interesting/useful/enjoyable/educational", whereas a downvote should mean "I find this uninteresting/not useful/unenjoyable/not educational".

In no universe does that preclude learning new things. Quite the contrary, in fact.

If you say "Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users" then you do miss the point of subreddits.

There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.

In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.

Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.

That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.

The default state of almost every subreddit is endless meta discourse about the subreddit itself. Then there is the inevitable fracturing when some participants disagree, while the original sub descends into the most vapid of the commons.

/r/atheism is the pinnacle example (this is a trend that becomes exaggerated the larger the sub).

The subreddit approach alone does not scale. Or rather it does scale by endless manual fracturing, which is a half-assed, luddite solution.

> I'm not missing the point of subreddits at all

Yes you are.

-former reddit employee

No, I'm not. The fact that you're a former reddit employee is entirely irrelevant, and if anything undermines your perspective on the merits of subreddits.

Was it really the reason reddit is successful? Or was that a combination of the creation of imgur, reddit moderators allowing any and all meme posts (low-investment content) in most of their subreddits, and Digg's v4 disaster?

Sure, there are users who adjust their subreddits, but (if I'm remembering this correctly) jedberg has stated the vast majority— some 90%— of users never make an account. I'm betting subreddits aren't the main reason reddit attracts so many people.

The front page of Reddit that is seen by the 90% of lurkers is content from the top 20 subreddits by activity. They come to see the content that 20 individual communities curate.

All content on Reddit -- all of it, comes from these individualized communities.

Also the 90% number -- that's true of almost any site, it's the "1% Rule"[1] (or a rule by a number of other names). Instead of focusing on the 90% lurkers, realize that it's the 1% of creators and 9% of contributors that create/submit and curate the content that brings the 90% to the front page.

So how do you attract the best 10%, the best curators, the best original creators?

In my opinion: individual communities dedicated to any topic they choose. Decentralized power that makes the 90%'s front page nothing more than the best-of-the-biggest subreddits. Sure, many subreddits will not be worthy of the 90%'s front page -- but then again, many communities don't want on the front page (and the massive influx of 'eternal september' users that it brings!)

Some subreddits, like /r/askscience, have over half a million users and maintain a rigid, empirical comment section that actively prevents layman speculation. Think about that, 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.

Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.

The beauty of Reddit is the freedom the subreddits have and the wonderful communities that create and curate the content that makes the 90%'s front page as good as it is.

I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

> the result being a bit of a disaster

If doubling your traffic every 8-12 months for seven years is a disaster...

I remember when RIM was bragging about their subscriber growth while everyone could see the writing on the wall. This seems kind of similar.

Reddit has the inertia effect right now. The potential upside shrinks while the potential downside explodes.

I'm not sure machine learning algorithms are the right approach. Crowd curation mechanisms (i.e. the upvote/downvote systems but one could imagine other systems) have the advantage of quickly adapting to the ever changing tastes of a community. I don't think machine learning approaches can be simultaneously good and flexible in such a diverse environment. The Netflix analogy isn't the best because Netflix deals with a pretty structured problem in comparison to the "recommend me things on the internet that I will like" problem.

I will also claim that subreddits are by no means a hack. They are THE key feature of Reddit that allows users to join together on the basis of common interests. There's no replacing subreddits because they are a killer feature in their own right.

> It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to

Also, it shouldn't matter what Usenet newsgroups I read and what TV channels I watch.

Let me welcome you to the modern era. While you might have once had your content dictated by the radio station you listened to, or the one channel your TV could receive, here in the 21st century we have other, slightly more refined mechanisms. "I like NBC" or "I enjoy the Top 40 station" are no longer the limits of your filtering mechanism.

Enjoy your stay.

Right, because trying to use an algorithm to filter a firehose will never end up with a firehose blasting through that particular kleenex.

If you want to see a bad job of filtering, by all means rely on an algorithm that is designed to give minimal acceptable performance because anything else would soak up too much CPU. I'll stick to moderation and subfora.

Your false dichotomy is an enjoyable bit of fiction.

If my post is a false dichotomy, you really suck at expressing an idea in written English.

Alternately, you're just entirely too dense to have any participation in this conversation, completely miss the point in your haste to post "witty" and hilariously inappropriate analogies.

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